Who's been stopping their renders early?
Griffin Avid
Posts: 3,758
in The Commons
I've read before that some here are stopping the renders early-
Once you get to an acceptable ...con...vergence....
You can sorta say any more is overkill...
I think I had a winner at 80%.
What do you guys usually do?
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And stopping is cancelling the little render window that shows the updating scroll of time spent rendering and iray canvass stuff.
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Comments
I stop mine early all the time. It totally depends on how good it looks though, I try and make sure all the graininess is gone in the darkest areas. I can't really give a specific number, I just stop it when I think its done.
I run mine till it's finished. Then again, I don't do postwork, so I rely on the finished render.
Yeah, I kinda have to lol. I crank everything waaaaaaaaaaay up. Like max samples to like 15 million, quality to a million and time to 0 lol.
I always do, otherwise I'd be leaving things rendering for weeks probably. I just render big, leave the default samples at 5000, set the max time to 0, and when it looks good to me I stop it. The longest render I've done went for a bit over 48 hours at 3k resolution and only got to 48%; but then that was an environment, no people.
This one though, rendered at the same size for the same amount of time and only got to about 5%. So for me it's a toss up; when it's acceptable to me I stop it and then shrink the render down in PS.
And both of these renders had a combination of HDRi and emissive lighting.
It depends but I usally let stuff complete if it appears to be going quickly. Otherwise I will stop it when it looks good. I go by the appearence of the image and not the % of convergence
When I think it looks good, I stop it. I use my computer for a lot of stuff. I can't imagine letting it render for a day or more. I'd go nuts.
I'm blessed enough to have a fairly newish computer with a decent NVIDIA card so I rarely stop my renders early. The difference between 85% and 100% can sometimes be subtle, but it's noticeable to me.
Greetings,
Even with a fast card, I stop it all the time, as I notice little things that are out of sort, and I want to tweak. Fingers pressing into each other, feet not quite on the floor, a surface that looks awful because it wasn't native Iray, the DoF isn't quite right or the focal distance needs to be moved in or out, a texture that isn't quite rendering right, clothing or hair not hanging right, etc., etc., etc... I stop renders about 4-5 times as often as I let one go all the way to completion. And with an nVidia 1080, I still do 4-8 hour final renders, because I render at 4K resolution, even if I'm going to shrink it down for posting. It just means my non-final renders get to a state that I can see things that are wrong SO much faster.
I've started using the Interactive renderer much more often, but it still doesn't seem to quite match certain tweaked aspects like Gamma, and such.
-- Morgan
Since I only have one computer and can't really do much else while an image is rendering, I tend to stop them as soon as they look good : )
Same here.
I've retained the habits of having an "inferior" computer. I will start and stop test renders all the time between tweaks. I do my full renders when I'm away from the computer (day job, sleep, housework, shopping, etc.) I set my max time at 28800 (8 hours) with 99% convergence. I've yet to encounter an image I'm doing that needs longer; my sleep/work times are best for my full renders. Like divamakeup, I can notice the subtle differences if I stop early.
I'll stop early if I notice something that needs tweaking. Once those things are addressed, then I'll let a render complete. Though I have stopped renders at 85%-90% if it looks "good enough"
You don't count, you're like a supreme ...erm....whatever title you want today....
I meant normal folk rendering artworx.
Besides for your business, you probably should let it go all out. lol
Sidenote: Your ambush alley is rendering behind me as we speak.
no post work yet....
I have an older, slightly weird, computer. 1080p can take 4 hours to render, depending on lighting and geometry. Hardware accelerated :P
I do small renders, little window renders, patch renders, and lots of test renders with the max quality set to 25% or whatever while I'm getting everything settled. I use OpenGL renders to get a sense of posing and blocking, blurry-as-heck unfinished Iray renders to get a sense of lighting, spot renders to check out material settings...
I run my finals overnight or while I'm out running errands, unless I've got an urgent deadline (at which point I'm bouncing up and down in my chair chanting DO IT DO IT DO IT).
It depends on what I'm doing really. I use 2 machines for my workflow, if I'm sitting at my desk working and only actively working on one, then I have the secondary running a render to window and will end it whenever it looks good. If I'm not at my computer, then I set everything to run for 6 hours to 95% convergence and have it render direct to file. I got into that habit when I was first learning how to light scenes and all of my renders had to run that long to come out right (I also render at 3840×6827, so it takes a while even with good light). I've finally started to get the hang of lighting, so some of my renders are finishing in about 2 hours now. That's why I've started rendering to window so I can end it when they hit an acceptable quality level.
I have an old computer so a complex scene or one with atmospherics can take days to render. Unfortunately those are exactly the types of renders I like, at least in iRay. 3DL goes much much faster. In either case I render several different passes and combine them in a graphics program. Usually only one takes a really long time - if they only take hours I'll let them "cook" so to speak. I do stop a long render when its about 80%+, if I think it looks good enough. I'll reduce the image size, de-noise it, add smoke brushs or blurs or clones to hide obvious artifacts or grain, and combine with other, quicker renders to recapture sharper details those techniques might muddle.
actively working on one, then I have the secondary running a render
I thought about this as a solution and a massive increase in productivity, but then I can't think- how to solve sharing content for 2 installs of Daz Studio, on two separate machines.
I can network the drives, but that would be SLOW. How are you doing this?
I have DIM installed on both machines to install all of my daz content on both machines, and all non-daz stuff I extract the zips into my primary computer's download folder, set everything up like it belongs in the library, and copy it over to my secondary before I move it into my primaries library.
Greetings,
I'm not the poster, but that's exactly what I do. I do installs on one machine, and they are mirrored over my network to the other. So the content exists on both computers, on their own 1TB drives each, so access from their local DAZ Studio instance is still quick.
If you already have a NAS, most have some sort of software that allows you to do this. (Mirror to the NAS, and then down to a special directory on each client.) I use Dropbox for this, mostly, and it has a 'LAN Sync' mode which allows my Windows box (with all the render power) to sync from my Mac (where I do the installs).
Coincidentally, it also means I have a backup of My Library, but the big win is syncing between my home machines so I can do exactly that: work on one scene actively, while the last one renders.
If you don't have a NAS, you can use rsync on Mac, and I'm certain there's equivalent programs for Windows... The key thing to remember is that all you need to do is copy the installed content between the machines. They don't need to talk to each other any more than that, really.
-- Morgan
Sadly, I never even thought of using a NAS when I set mine up, and I should have. Do you think it would work to map the NAS as a drive on each machine, and just install everything to the library on that drive from one computer? I'm not worried about latency issues, I've got plenty of throughput on my network.
I assume that everyone is talking about Iray? It has been a while since I played with Iray and Lux Render.
Technically with Reality/Lux you are always stopping the renders early, since if you didn't stop it when satisfied it would run forever. Unless this has changed in more recent versions as I have not used Reality much since version 1.
My impression is that the little details on skin renders only start to really pop out after 90% convergence. That's why I let it render to 98% and yes, it takes like forever (CPU rendering), depending on the scene. That's why I also try to have a second instance of DAZ running, so I can prepare the next scene. Or I prepare a couple of scenes and have a batch render over night.
There's also a massive debate thread I found when I first got here...about whether to run renders as GPU....CPU or BOTH?
What's the bar for a system that decides the best route?
for example, ahem....i7 processor 64bit...24 gigs GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
Someone would probably say depends so....
Yeah I do the same. Once it's rendered enough for me to see the details I'm looking for, I'll either stop and tweak, or let it continue till completion. This is why I do most of my final renders at night.
And hopefully don't make the mistake of hitting the Cancel instead of the Save button when I drowsily get up the next morning "D'oh"!
It really depends on the use of the image. I do a lot of images that will be used in a powerpoint situation and I have no problem using images with only a few hundred iterations - projections do not have the quality to show the difference. Newer presentations using a large screen monitor require better images. For book printing purposes, I try for at least 95% convergance if not full.
There is no 'done,' just however far you feel like rendering.
I always make the settings excessive so I can stop it when I want, unless I know I only need a basic render (like when I'm rendering stuff that's going to run through postwork so fine detail is going to vanish anyway).
My general approach:
0 time limit (so 'forever), render quality 20, convergence 99%.
Then I wait until:
Does it look good?
Is it over 30% convergence?
Is the convergence updating at 1% or less per iteration?
Sometimes I skip the second, when the image looks really good, has been rendering for a long time, and the convergence is stuck at 0 or 1%. That's a sign some calculation isn't working right so nevermind that.
It really depends on a lot of parameters of the set.
Sometimes for outdoor-sets there are annoying dark and light grains in deep shadow areas of the character's skins only disappearing above 99.5% of "real" convergement.
Other renders (indoor with the built-in lamps) are good enough at already 10%.
In my situations the progress is only 0.2% to 0.1% per progress-update at the end. But it is worth having the patience to let those naughty specles disappear.
Hmm. If I've got the settings up high and it's a darker scene, most of the time, but I'm running without an NVIDIA card so something like that would be at least six hours. There's a point where I know it's not going to get noticeably better, and as long as the sparklies are under control I'll say good enough and handle the rest in post. Of course, I also render really large and reduce way down...
If an image looks finished to the naked eye, then stop rendering it. What else would are you going to look at it with? Nobody but you will ever know that the computer thought it was only 80% through creating the image, and if the image is a good one they won't care either.
Like othres have said, I tend to run my renders when I'm elsewhere or asleep, which tends to be long enough to "finish" them. But if I was happy with an "unfinished" image and needed to move on, I'd stop that render without any hesitation.